


All the Glory

by story_monger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dark Dean Winchester, Gen, Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 21:02:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6129976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is back from hell, and he recognizes its detritus when he sees it.</p><p>Companion to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6129969">Spiral</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Glory

Dean is in a house so new the smell of plaster rolls off the walls. Trish—Stacey?—is behind him buried under white cotton blankets carrying the scent of brisk plastic packaging and Macy’s. She’s running from something; Dean recognizes the tone.

He shuffles down the hall, shoulder bumping against serene beige walls, while fiddling with his pants zipper. He has them fastened when he reaches the kitchen and glances at the black mirror of the sliding glass door and sees a face.

It hangs at the height a dog’s face would be. It has shoulders and arms sloping into darkness. It has no skin.

Dean doesn’t move. The face’s mouth is parted; a red tongue wriggles from between teeth that are stark white against the livid red of muscle. It looks for all the world like a living anatomy illustration. It’s eyes—bloodshot, pupils blown open—flick to meet Dean’s. Dean splits into a grin.

He moves through the kitchen to the side door that leads to the driveway. There, the Impala broods in the moonlight, and a skittering sound comes from the back of the house. Dean slides into the Impala and watches a hunched figure gallop on all fours around the house’s corner. He shuts the door just before a heavy body smacks into it. He can hear the tacky sound of bloody muscle peeling away from the door.

He revs the engine and starts to back out. He keeps an eye on the thing while he eases into the quiet, 15 mph road and crawls away from Trish-or-Stacey’s house. If it crawls toward her door again, he’s going to have to go after it. His breath is tight. Maybe it’s what he thinks it is. Maybe it will recognize him and know what he can give it. Maybe. He drives slower.

Dean lets out a sudden laugh. In his rearview mirror, the thing wobbles onto two legs and shuffles after the car. It moves like the act is painful, and Dean decides it still has its nerves. That’s nasty stuff.

He makes it two miles down the main road before the thing drops out of sight. He drives the rest of the way to the motel in silence, picking at a scab on his chin and humming.

***

He and Sam drive south to West Virginia to pick off a nasty nest of ghouls, and a week later they’re cleaning an old couple’s home of a few vengeful spirits. It’s the most productive they’ve been since Dean came back.

Sam looks at Dean with more hope in his eyes because Dean keeps laughing or smiling or generally being magnanimous about life. Sam can’t have seen the thing made of slicked muscle that appears in the rearview mirror at night.

After the old couple, they take a break to collect income via a long chain of dive bars. One of those nights, when they’re in the dead center of South Carolina, Sam turns in early; the motel is close enough to walk. Dean lingers at the bar up until closing time, and even then he chats with the bartender while the parking lot empties out. When the last car rolls from the gravel lot, Dean leans against the Impala’s flank and pulls out a cigarette. He’s gotten back into the habit.

The thing’s dramatic timing is impeccable. It appears just after a thick hill of clouds passes in front of the waxing moon. It’s only visible by the bare light that gleams off is wet surface. Dean flicks the cigarette into the gravel, crosses his arms, and waits.

It shuffles around for a long time, trying to figure the situation out. When it rushes at Dean, it has a frenzied air like it’s not convinced it’s doing the smart thing.

Dean crouches, opens his arms as if for a hug. It crashes into him, and its blunt teeth dive for his throat. It’s hot, heavy, slippery, and Dean almost looses hold of it. He wrangles it into a chokehold; he lets it writhe for a few minutes before it sags. He grasps for the knife in his belt; he should wait and do this the right way but he can smell the sulfur rippling off wet muscle and his mouth is pooling. He brings up the knife and plunges it pretty as a flower into the thing’s chest. It doesn’t scream, but it does jerk. Dean slides the knife down the delineation made by its pectorals and its abdominal muscles. The sound of spillage is like taking a bite of a peach: full and sweet and running with juice. Purple-red intestine coil like sausage into the gravel; most of a pancreas and stomach plop atop them. The lungs tumble but don’t come all the way out.

Dean drops the knife and thrusts his hand into the chest, letting his fingers run up the ribs and play with the ridges of the trachea. He finds the heart; his fingers scrabble for it. He pops it out; the thing doesn’t so much as complain. Dean shoves the heart into his mouth and bites and it’s like every good, sunny afternoon.

***

Sam and Dean sing at the tops of their lungs for 120 miles through South Carolina. They’re going to the beach; Sam found a whole string of sailor disappearances in the local news. Sam thinks it’s a ghost ship. Dean thinks they deserve to take time to get sun and catch babes.

They stop an hour from their destination to gas up. Sam goes into the convenience store to piss and buy supplies. Dean checks the trunk; he’s pleased. The neat package of tarp in the back corner isn’t leaking at all.

***

Finding the cabin is a stroke of pure luck, and it’s not hard to convince Sam they should use it while working this case. Sam gets drawn into the local history, which is rife with drowned sailors, while Dean nests.

He finds a cellar stocked with ancient cans of soup and hunting supplies. He drags the tarp down there while Sam is at the library. Dean fetches high quality twine, a thick needle, and the spilled organs, and spends the afternoon patching the thing together again. The sulfur builds up in the cellar, and Dean takes deeper and deeper inhales until his lungs ache, and then he opens his mouth to feel the sulfur on his gums and back of his throat.

“Rules’re different here,” he tells the thing when he’s finished. “No regeneration. But we’ll make do.” He surveys the twine sewed in neat, small stitches. The thing gazes up at him, almost adoring. It makes no move to lunge toward him. A small part of Dean is disappointed; he’d been spoiled by hell souls on the brink of demonhood fighting for the last dregs of their humanity. Dean can’t imagine this thing fought for more than a few rounds on the rack; lost its will easy as eyeballs popping from a socket. He can imagine how it went: a sickly, thin soul left in one of the myriad piles that scattered long halls. It was a charred ember in the great bonfire and some updraft brought it to Earth. Or who knows, maybe it had the gumption to crawl up here on its own, slipping through the cracks that run through reality. Dean’s sure it had visions of clean Earth air and cool Earth water all while forgetting it’s not a living thing, not a proper soul, not lucky enough to be a demon.

It’s lucky it found Dean; it knows it too, the way it’s looking at him.

Dean bends down and does what Alistair did the first time he skinned Dean. He kisses the thing on plump, moist lips, and pulls away with a mouth full of iron. It’s so good he does it again, and he can imagine he’s back in a place with clever, smooth knives and empty chest cavities and pain so poignant it’s art, it’s erotic, it’s all of glory. Maybe he can find his way there again. Maybe he can harness the angel to carry him back down to Alistair’s teeth. Maybe. Maybe. He has to hope. Maybe.

 


End file.
